Brooklyn Boundary Commission Finalizes Borders Of Neue Williamsburg Which Begins Where Old Williamsburg Becomes Too Expensive
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK — Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat report that the New York City Department of City Planning has formally designated a new neighborhood called Neue Williamsburg, bounded by Flushing Avenue to the south, Bushwick Avenue to the east, Metropolitan Avenue to the north, and the western border of Old Williamsburg to the west, which is the area that was previously called “part of Williamsburg” and before that was called “the edge of Williamsburg” and before that was called “not quite Williamsburg but walkable to” and which is now called Neue Williamsburg on the grounds that it is “a distinct community with its own character and identity” that requires its own designation for the purposes of real estate listings, which is the purpose for which almost all New York City neighborhood naming decisions are made regardless of what the official rationale states.
The designation was proposed by a coalition of three real estate companies and approved by the Community Board after a meeting that Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat described as “characteristically democratic in process and characteristically real-estate-driven in outcome.” The name “Neue Williamsburg” was selected from a shortlist that also included “West Williamsburg,” “Williamsburg Heights,” “New Williamsburg,” and “The Burg,” the latter having been rejected on the grounds that The Burg was already an informal name for Williamsburg itself and that using it for the adjacent area would create confusion that was commercially unhelpful. “Neue” was selected because it communicates newness in a way that is simultaneously familiar enough to invoke the Williamsburg brand and European enough to suggest the kind of international cosmopolitan character that the real estate marketing materials for the neighborhood’s new developments are targeting.
New York’s Neighborhood Proliferation: A Statistical Overview
New York City now has 247 named neighborhoods by the most comprehensive current mapping, up from approximately 150 in 1980, a proliferation driven almost entirely by real estate marketing’s incentive to create neighborhood identities that allow properties to be associated with desirable adjacent areas while being priced below the adjacent area’s peak, a strategy that requires the creation of new neighborhood names at the boundary of every area whose median price has risen beyond the target market’s reach. The Bronx, which was not traditionally a source of neighborhood naming creativity, now has 34 named sub-neighborhoods. Downtown Brooklyn has 11. The area between Park Slope and Carroll Gardens has three names that are actively disputed, two that are used occasionally, and one that was coined in 2022 and appears only in listings for a single development.
Long-term residents of the areas being renamed tend to have opinions about the renaming. The opinions tend not to be positive. They tend not to affect the renaming.
Neue Williamsburg
Average two-bedroom asking rent: $3,850. Adjacent Old Williamsburg: $4,400. The naming has achieved its purpose. For NYC satire at NewsThump.
New York And The Civic Comedy Tradition
New York City has been generating material for satirists since the first European settlers arrived and decided to purchase an island for sixty guilders, establishing the civic tradition of transactions that seemed efficient at the time. The modern version of this tradition runs through the penny press, through H.L. Mencken, through the New Yorker, and through every stand-up comedian who has started a set with “so I was on the subway” in a West Village club. New York is simultaneously the American city most complained about and most deeply beloved, which is its defining civic characteristic and the reason every New Yorker who leaves eventually misses it in ways they refuse to admit for at least three years. The specific pathologies of New York governance — the housing gap, the infrastructure lag, the rat-to-human ratio, the transit perpetual delay event — are not unique to New York. They are the urban pathologies of every large American city compressed into one place and given a media ecosystem that covers them with appropriate seriousness and inappropriate humor in proportions that vary by publication. This piece chooses humor. The New York Times chooses seriousness. Both are legitimate responses to the same facts. The MTA delays are real regardless of which genre processes them. The coffee is five dollars. This is not satirical. It is just expensive, and the deli owner is not to blame, and the customer will return tomorrow.
Statistics cited draw from public city data, MTA reports, and reporting by Gothamist, the New York Times, and The City. For ongoing coverage, Bohiney New York and prat.uk New York.
This article is satire published by the Bohiney Network. The events, officials, statistics, and institutions described are drawn from public records, verified news reporting, and established journalistic sources. The satirical frame — the deadpan tone, the mock-serious institutional assessment, the measured exaggeration of political and bureaucratic dynamics that are themselves frequently more extreme than the exaggeration applied to them — is original to this publication and to the editorial tradition of which it forms a part. Readers who encounter this piece in a context that presents it as straight news should be advised that it is not straight news; it is satirical journalism in the tradition of publications that have understood since Swift that the most accurate way to describe certain situations is to make them slightly more ridiculous than they actually are, which in the current political environment requires less exaggeration than one might wish.
The satirical tradition in which this piece operates — from Jonathan Swift through Mark Twain through Private Eye through The Onion through the contemporary publications working in the same vein — holds that exaggeration applied to genuine absurdity produces a more accurate picture of reality than straight-faced reporting sometimes can, because the exaggeration forces the reader to notice what the straight-faced version normalizes. The events and policies satirized in this piece are real. The treatment of those events and policies is satirical. The combination is the point. Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat are satirical publications. Everything in them should be read accordingly and shared generously. For more satire in this tradition, see The Onion, The Daily Mash, NewsThump, Waterford Whispers News, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/